Darnell Robinson has never quite lived up to the staggering numbers he put up while at Emery High School. Photo courtesy of Student Sports Magazine

Darnell Robinson has never quite lived up to the staggering numbers...

Image 2 of 2

Robinson scored 3,359 points during his career at Emery High School, a feat that put him on the cover of magazines and made him a highly sought-after college recruit. Photo courtesy of Student Sports Magazine

The Emery Spartans used to miss their free throws on purpose, assured that Darnell "Tank" Robinson would reach over a helpless player seemingly half his size, pluck away the rebound and easily drop the ball in the basket.

Nobody could stop that. Nobody could stop Tank, that "can't miss" kid who after four years at tiny Emery High would become the most prolific scorer in California prep history by the time he graduated in 1993.

Over the course of his final three seasons at the 190-student school in Emeryville, Robinson averaged more than 30 points, 20 rebounds and 10 blocked shots per game. He was considered among the top prospects in the nation by his senior year and was named to every conceivable All-America team, including the prestigious McDonald's squad. His high school coach, a respected Bay Area fixture, compared him favorably to local legends Bill Russell and Paul Silas.

Robinson appeared to be on the fast track to the NBA, a player with sweet skills in a burgeoning 6-foot-11-inch frame. He was so highly regarded by college coaches that the postman delivered a bag of mail a day to his address during the height of his recruitment. He could have had anything he wanted had he opted to indulge -- "I had everything (offered), from older women to people coming and trying to give me money."

But 27-year-old Darnell Robinson has not played a single second of NBA basketball. He never has even warranted a mention in a media guide, let alone a boxscore. Instead, the Oakland native has become an overseas basketball vagabond and, with the pro draft just three days away, a reminder that talent only goes so far and that the weighty decisions teenagers must make can be life-altering.

Robinson remains the greatest scorer in California schoolboy history. He was an integral part of a national championship team at the University of Arkansas and he has made a well-above-average living by playing basketball overseas. That said, through a combination of questionable decisions, foot injuries, a weight problem and a criticized work ethic, he is lumped by some experts with the biggest busts in McDonald's All-America history.

"I mean, God, when you looked at this kid, you kind of thought this would be Shaq before there was Shaq," said David Benezra, an amateur coach and a 25- year veteran on the recruiting scene. "This kid had the body and the strength in high school that worked over everybody else."

Now that body is back in Oakland, the NBA dream still alive in there somewhere, but the clock ticking.

Eight months after the 1996 NBA Draft, the Village Voice ran a story under the headline, "Where are they now? Tracking the fate of 1996's early NBA draft entries."

Of Robinson, who opted out of Arkansas after three seasons and was selected late by the Mavericks, the paper wrote: "Mrs. Robinson had a better chance to make the NBA. After wisely no-showing in Dallas, he signed in Italy."

Since bolting college, Robinson has meandered through an unsteady five years. He played for five teams in four seasons overseas, with barely an NBA nibble, and has been rehabilitating a broken foot since October.

More than five years after being ridiculed for leaving Arkansas early, "Tank" and his currently 295-pound frame recently were planted on a bench in Jack London Square, a few days removed from his birthday.

This, as the NBA Finals were about to begin and as the draft was less than a month away. And he was being asked to assess one of the critical turns he made along his basketball path -- going to Arkansas instead of staying in his backyard.

"Do you think if you had gone to Cal, your life would be -"

"Completely different," Robinson said, fully prepared, almost rehearsed, for the question. "Completely. I already know, it would have been the straight flip side. Yeah, for sure."

"Do you think you'd be in the NBA right now?"

"For sure, I think so. I'd bet a million dollars."

Darnell Robinson grew up in Oakland not all that differently from how many kids grow up in Oakland: fatherless and on the edge. He played basketball, but it wasn't a huge deal to him, no more so than football or baseball.

He was tall for his age -- 5-10 by the time he entered seventh grade -- but there was nothing to indicate he would sprout to unusual heights.

But Robinson grew nearly a foot over the next two years, and suddenly basketball became considerably more serious -- both for him and for the many people who wanted him to play for their respective teams.

It would have seemed most sensible for Robinson to wind up at a basketball powerhouse like St. Joseph of Alameda, where he could have joined forces with Jason Kidd and played against top-notch competition. Instead, because he says now he "wanted to start from scratch," Robinson went to Emery, a Division V school coached by Elio 'Abe" Abrami.

"Everyone said, 'You're gonna have trouble with this kid, he's a prima donna,' " said Abrami, now in virtual retirement and coaching the freshman team at Novato. "But in all the four years we were together, he was the most respectful player I ever coached."

He also was the most dominant player he ever coached, and consequently Emery crushed most of the Bay Counties League teams. Against institutions such as Lick-Wilmerding, Branson School and Marin Academy, Emery regularly ran up winning scores such as 91-51 or 109-58.

But the decision to attend Emery in the first place had two edges. Though Robinson says now the lack of competition didn't hurt him, many others disagree. And even he admitted as much during his freshman season at Arkansas when trying to explain the adjustment from high school to college.

It also didn't help that Robinson increasingly wanted to showcase his abilities away from the basket. His decent 3-point shot and solid ball- handling skills were talents that certainly made him rare for a near-7-footer, but coaches who have worked with him or against him at every level cited his penchant for playing on the perimeter as part of his inability to make it.

Also in high school, hunger became an issue -- both his literal desire to sate it, and his figurative lack of it; two problems that saddled him similarly at every turn.

"He was a natural," said Rob Lautt, then the head coach at College Prep in Oakland. "(But) he always did seem a little distracted or preoccupied."

Robinson says he's not a big eater and doesn't have a weight problem. But Abrami says his former player always had a weight issue and loved to eat, and former Castlemont coach Johnny Lorigo said, "The only thing I knew about Tank was obviously his talent but also of his gargantuan appetite. . . . The place to take him for a meal is all-you-can-eat. He's a buffet baby."

Still, Robinson was a big man who could play, and every college in the country took notice. Among those, of course, was Cal, and Robinson became increasingly close to Todd Bozeman, then an assistant coach under Lou Campanelli.

With Cal in the hunt, Robinson's rapport with Bozeman grew so strong that the two spoke regularly and at all hours.

"I was probably closer to him than any kid I recruited at the time," said Bozeman. "He used to call me all the time. He would call at 10, 11 o'clock at night. My wife would wake me up and say, 'Hey, it's Tank.' "

Bozeman says he and Robinson even had a plan down to the numbers, with Monty Buckley wearing No. 3, Al Grigsby No. 4, Kidd No. 5 and Darnell No. 6. But fate stepped in and waylaid those plans.

About a month before the fall signing period, Robinson drove with several family members to Tulsa for the funeral of his great grandmother. Nolan Richardson, by then the well-regarded coach of Arkansas' "40 Minutes of Hell," had longtime roots in Tulsa. And those roots soon reached out to set up a meeting between Richardson and Robinson.

A month later, Robinson having been overwhelmed by Richardson's sales pitch,

he committed to Arkansas. Three months after that, Campanelli was fired at Cal and replaced by Bozeman -- but Robinson already had made his promise, and he planned to keep it.

"He made the wrong decision on what school to go to," said Calvin Andrews, who runs the Bay Area's top AAU program. "One, Cal was on a roll, getting lots of national attention; they had Jason Kidd and Lamond Murray, and he could have played with them.

"And he wouldn't have been able to hide. Todd Bozeman would have made sure in the offseason he was working out constantly. People could have kept a thumb on him, and Darnell needed someone to keep a thumb on him."

Fayetteville (pop. 58,047) is a college town in the northwest corner of Arkansas, near the borders of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, 115 miles due east of Tulsa. The nearest city with a pro sports franchise is Kansas City, some 241 miles away.

"Fayetteville. Fayetteville," Robinson said, smiling. "It's just about how it sounds."

But from sleepy Fayetteville, Razorback mania reaches out across the state, leaving no one untouched. The beneficiary of this idolatry is the Arkansas athlete, who is rarely left wanting.

"They took care of us, you know what I'm saying," Robinson said. "You don't have to do nothing when you're a basketball player in the state of Arkansas."

Still, almost from the beginning, it was clear to him he made a mistake choosing Arkansas over Cal and others. The Razorbacks did end up winning the national title his freshman season, and Robinson did play a pivotal role with three big performances that helped get them to the title game, but the experience was not what he had planned.

Robinson says he was promised a starting position by Richardson during the brief recruiting process, but that the Arkansas coach didn't follow through. Robinson started only six games his freshman season, all during the Razorbacks' NCAA Tournament run.

"I had a problem when (Richardson) told me I would be starting and then he didn't start me," said Robinson, who says he clashed with his coach throughout his three years at Arkansas. " 'Cause I'm not a liar. If I tell you something, it would be the truth."

Richardson did not return repeated phone calls for this story, though media reports and others who know Robinson or who were around at the time provide some clues behind the tension. For one thing, the weight issue that hovered about Robinson when he was in high school became even more public at Arkansas.

When Robinson returned to Fayetteville after his freshman season, he reported at nearly 300 pounds. He says he had knee surgery that summer and couldn't work out, but there are those in the Oakland basketball scene who say the summer never was Robinson's thing.

"I used to go over to his house and try to convince him to come on out and play ball with us up at Cal," said Brian Shaw, the 35-year-old Lakers guard and 12-year NBA veteran who grew up in Oakland. "But it was really hard to talk him into coming. He would come sometimes, but not really often, not regularly.

"It was me, Kidd, (Gary) Payton, Chris Mullin when he was still here, Mitch Richmond, and a lot of the guys from Cal, like Lamond (Murray) and (Al Grigsby). It was all the pros, and I wanted him to understand that this is what you do to stay in the league, to be a pro, to get better. But I guess he really didn't have that kind of work ethic. It's been kind of like that for him all along."

Robinson considered leaving Arkansas for the NBA Draft after his sophomore season but decided to wait one more year. For guidance and representation, he turned to Henry Thomas, an agent he met after his final season at Emery while working at a basketball camp run by then-Warriors guard Tim Hardaway.

It didn't matter that Thomas' conversations with NBA officials indicated nobody was clamoring to select Robinson. Nor did it matter that the year before he had watched teammate Scotty Thurman come out early to dreadful results.

But what Blake and many others didn't know was that in addition to being tired of playing at Arkansas, Robinson also had become a father. On March 4 of that year, as the Razorbacks were preparing for the Southeastern Conference tournament, Robinson's high school sweetheart, Kim, had given birth to a baby girl, Darnesha.

"She was all the drive," Robinson said of how his daughter's birth impacted his decision to leave Arkansas. "Not really like the money, just more of, 'I know it's time to be a man. I gotta step out on my own and do this.' "

Three months later, Robinson checked into a room at the Hilton Oakland Airport and, along with his closest friends and family, waited for his name to be announced on national television.

Robinson and company waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, with the 58th and final pick of the draft, the Dallas Mavericks selected the 22-year-old center known affectionately as "Tank."

Dallas promptly labeled Robinson a "project" and suggested he'd be better off playing in Europe.

Robinson's first overseas experience was with Pallacanestro Trieste, a team situated in the forgotten part of Italy, across the Adriatic Sea, along the borders of Slovenia and Croatia.

There, he says, he signed a $180,000 contract and was made to "feel like a king in the whole country. . . . And that wasn't even a big team. I have no complaints about that over there."

But in expounding on his time overseas, Robinson says that each of the five teams he has played for "probably owes me some money." And of the overall experience across the Atlantic, he said, "Oh man, it's just not America, that's it. They don't do their business. The business is done in European terms. The black and white don't mean what it says."

After that first season in Italy, Robinson returned to the States, where the Mavericks retained his rights. He joined up with Dallas' summer league team, which was being run by Mavericks assistant coach Charlie Parker.

Parker had an affinity for Robinson, having recruited "Tank" out of Emery when he was an assistant coach at USC. Parker had suggested the Mavericks make Robinson their final pick of the '96 draft and pushed to have him play with the team the following summer.

The Mavericks had heard much about Robinson's questionable work ethic, but Parker says he saw none of that and was "pleasantly surprised" by Robinson's effort. What Parker and others did see, though, during those practices and games at the Rocky Mountain Revue in Salt Lake City was that Robinson still was stuck on his outside game.

"He wanted to shoot jump shots," Parker said. "He wanted to handle the ball and do a lot of things outside, and he never developed that inside presence that his size would dictate. I thought in the final analysis that hurt him."

After returning from another season overseas, this time in Israel, the Mavericks eventually released Robinson, and his agent, Thomas, says he couldn't find any takers. There was a tryout in Miami that went nowhere, but little else. Robinson returned overseas in the fall of '98, first to play in Greece, then, after he was cut for failing to appear in an all-star game, briefly for a team in Paris.

"I had an emergency, I had to come home," Robinson said of missing the all- star game.

By this time, Robinson and Thomas no longer were speaking. The agent says he made repeated efforts to contact his player but the calls went unanswered. Robinson says he thought Thomas' load was getting too heavy and he needed to make a change.

In the fall of '99, Robinson returned to Greece, where he signed with ARIS Thessaloniki but did little to alter his reputation.

"He is one of the greatest underachievers I've ever been involved with in the last 25 years," said Nikos Tsahtanis, an assistant coach with ARIS who has been part of the pro leagues overseas as either a player or coach for the past quarter century.

In the spring of 2000, through a referral by former Arkansas teammate Clint McDaniel, Robinson hooked up with agent Matt Muehlebach, a former player at Arizona. Muehlebach says the two agreed it was time for Robinson to get himself in great shape with an eye toward getting a shot with an NBA team or, at the very least, returning overseas in excellent condition.

That summer, Robinson showed up in Fayetteville to run with the Razorbacks.

"He came in for a couple of weeks," said Mike Anderson, an assistant coach at Arkansas who was close to Robinson during his playing days with the Hogs. "He had really blown up and he wanted to have a place to concentrate on working out."

Robinson worked himself into good enough shape to get a tryout with the Philadelphia 76ers when they opened camp in October. But a few days into that audition, he broke his right foot. The Sixers, who were light on big men at the time and who would go on to make the NBA Finals eight months later, released Robinson on Oct. 6.

Now he's back in Oakland, still nursing that foot and hoping he can avoid surgery. The plan is the same as it was last summer. And the summer before that. And the summer before that. Get a shot, hope to stick. If not, back overseas, where an American can make a pretty penny -- if he can collect on his contract.

The NBA dream still lives, though.

"Yeah, for sure," Robinson said. "I think it's a possibility every day I watch a game. For sure, it's even more of a possibility."

But why hasn't it happened yet?

"Whew, if I had the answer to that question, I'd straighten it out and hit the target. I mean, I think it all boils down to just basketball."

The Road More Traveled -- 1989-1993: Emery High school, Emeryville (have foto) -- 1993-1996: University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Ark. (have foto) -- June 26, 1996: Selected by Dallas Mavericks with the 58th and final pick of the NBA draft -- 1996-1997: Played for Pallacanestro Trieste (Italy) -- Summer of '97: Played for Dallas Mavericks summer league team in Salt Lake City -- 1997-1998: Played for Bnei Herziliya (Israel) (have foto) -- Summer 1998: Worked out for Miami Heat but not signed -- 1998-1999: Played a half-season for AC Apollon Patron (Patra, Greece) before being released. Followed by brief stint in France with Paris Saint Germain Racing, which also cut him -- 1999-2000: Played for ARIS Thessaloniki (Greece) -- Oct. 2000: Signed for Philadelphia 76ers training camp, but broke his foot and was released shortly thereafter -- Current: Rehabbing foot in Oakland State hotshots California High School career scoring leaders -- 1. Darnell Robinson, Emery High, 1989-93, 3,359 points